Just how deep were the 1998-99 Calgary Flames on their goaltending depth chart?

This latest arrival, it seems, didn’t even own duds for the occasion.

“We were in Pittsburgh, and even with (Tyrone) Garner up, we didn’t have a backup,” recalled Al Coates, the Flames’ general manager during that injury-riddled season, the first of the Young Guns promotional era. “Our East Coast League team was in Johnstown, which was not that far away, so we made a phone call to get their goalie. Toby O’Brien, the manager there in Johnstown, told this kid, ‘You know, this is the National Hockey League. You have to look presentable.’ So the kid goes and he rents, I think, a tuxedo.

“It was either a rented tuxedo or a rented dress suit. It was pretty comical. Needless to say, it was quite an adventure for him.”

That kid, Pavel Nestak of the Czech Republic, was actually the Flames’ insurance policy to their insurance policy for a Jan. 5, 1999, clash with mulleted superstar Jaromir Jagr and the Penguins in Pittsburgh.

Coates had summoned another netminder from the Flames’ farm club in Saint John, N.B., but Nestak made the 110-kilometre drive from Johnstown just in case one of Igor Karpenko’s three connecting flights was delayed.

As it turns out, Nestak was back in his rented finery by puck-drop.

Karpenko was signed and delivered — by a taxi-cab, that is — midway through the pre-game warmup. He served as the second-stringer to Garner, a 20-year-old junior up from the Oshawa Generals of the Ontario Hockey League on an emergency recall.

Garner made his first and, as it turns out, only NHL start that night.

“They lost the game 5-1 and Garner played the whole game, but (Karpenko), you would’ve thought he played the game and won the game because he was dancing around the dressing room afterward,” said Hockey Hall-of-Fame broadcaster Peter Maher, the longtime radio voice of the Flames. “He was just so excited to have been involved in an NHL game, even though he didn’t actually play.

“He stood out from everything in the room. The players were pretty down, but he was excited as hell.”

Everybody who accompanied the out-of-town team to Pittsburgh on Jan. 5, 1999, seems to have a knee-slapper from that visit to The Igloo.

Brian Sutter, the first of three brothers from Alberta’s famous hockey family to serve as head coach of the Flames, remembers a panic as the equipment staff tried to find a sweater for one of the puck-stopping options.

“It was a last-minute thing, and we sent him out in somebody else’s jersey,” Sutter chuckled. “We said, ‘Hey, nobody knows who the hell he is anyway! So how is anybody going to know if there’s a different name on the back of his jersey?’ And he went out for warmup like that.”

Goalies who suited up for the Flames in 1998-99, from top left, clockwise: Ken Wregget, Tyler Moss, Jean-Sebastien Giguere, Andrei Trefilov, Tyrone Garner and Fred Brathwaite.

Karpenko, who would later represent Team Ukraine at the 2002 Olympics, and Nestak would also tug on the Flaming C logo but wouldn’t see any game action.

They can all laugh about it now, although the current plight of the Vegas Golden Knights — with a rash of goaltending injuries of their own — must be bringing back some painful memories.

Golden Knights go-to Marc-Andre Fleury, who agreed to waive a no-move clause to become the face-of-the-franchise for the expansion squad in Sin City, suffered a concussion in only the fourth game of their existence.

The spotlight briefly belonged to Malcolm Subban, until he joined Fleury on injured reserve with a lower-body injury.

Oscar Dansk debuted with three straight victories and a sparkling stat-line.

On Monday morning, Dansk was named the NHL’s second star of the week. On Monday night in Brooklyn, he was injured.

Maxime Lagace has started the past two contests for the Golden Knights, including a 2-1 road loss Thursday to the Boston Bruins.

Nineteen-year-old Dylan Ferguson, the only other crease option under contract to the NHL’s 31st team, was S.O.S-ed from the Western Hockey League’s Kamloops Blazers to back up.

“I lived that almost 20 years ago, so I completely understand what (Ferguson) is going through,” said Garner, who tended twine professionally for more than a decade but logged his only big-league action during that eye-opening stint in 1998-99. “Coming out of junior, mentally, it’s tough. You’re excited because this is something that you’ve dreamed of your whole entire life, but you’re not expected to be there. You’ve already gone to training camp, been sent back to your junior team. They all have depth charts, and you kind of know where you stand on the depth chart, and really you’re not expecting to be there for another year or two years, if that.

“So it’s a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. You’re excited. You’re nervous. You kind of question yourself and you wonder if you’re ready, but you have to get in the mindset that whatever level you’re at as a goalie, your job is to stop the puck.”

The difference, at least for now, is Ferguson hasn’t been pressed into action.

Garner’s emergency recall with the 1998-99 Flames lasted more than a month.

He was the backup to Giguere, then the backup to Trefilov.

And then, suddenly, he was next up.

For about a month, Tyler Moss split duties with Giguere.

Trefilov was injured in the opening minute on Jan. 4, 1999, in Boston. Garner, who had debuted in the third period two nights earlier in Buffalo, was now needed for 59-plus minutes of relief against Ray Bourque and the Bruins.

He started the following night in Pittsburgh.

“I remember, when I played in the Boston game, a reporter asked me: ‘How did you feel?’ ” said Garner, who now works as a police officer in Burlington, Ont., and also runs his own goaltending academy. “There were times where I felt confident, and there were times — and again, it’s the mental aspect of going from junior to pro hockey — where I didn’t feel confident. I kind of felt overwhelmed, and then your mind starts going and you have to regroup. Then, you get a flurry of shots and you felt good again, you felt confident, felt like ‘Yeah, I can play here.’

“And then you have Sergei Samsonov and Joe Thornton come down and tic-tac-toe and it’s in the net, and then you’re feeling like, ‘Maybe I’m in a bit over my head.’ But you don’t have time to really digest that until after the game.”

The Golden Knights have only dressed five masked men so far, but it’s early.

The Flames’ run of bad luck between the pipes — or as Sutter refers to it, “the roving goalie spectacle” — didn’t start until Nov. 3, 1998.

Acquired in an off-season swap, Wregget had been in the blue paint for 11 consecutive games that fall — including both halves of a season-opening set against the San Jose Sharks in Tokyo — before being sidelined by a troublesome back. He wouldn’t return until February.

For upwards of a month, Moss split the duties with Giguere, then considered the goaltender-of-the-future at the Saddledome.

In mid-December, Moss was hobbled by a groin tear.

In their first contest after Christmas, Giguere was lost due to a hamstring pull.

A parade of goalies dressed for the Flames after Jean-Sebastien Giguere went down with a hamstring pull.

The next day, the Flames reacquired old pal Trefilov, who had previously played three seasons in Calgary’s organization and cost a seventh-round pick to bring back from the Chicago Blackhawks.

Trefilov was the answer for one week.

After he suffered a groin injury of his own, it was Garner’s turn.

The losses, like the injuries, piled up. That 5-1 defeat in Pittsburgh marked eight straight.

“At one point, (Dave) Elston did a cartoon,” Coates said. “The circus was in town, and there was a cartoon floating around of me talking to two bears, asking if either one of them played goal.”

The Flames finally solved their crease crisis — not at the circus, but the Spengler Cup.

Brathwaite had been a backup for the Edmonton Oilers from 1993-96, but he was toiling that winter with the Calgary-based national program and had just backstopped Team Canada to gold at the annual holiday tournament in Davos, Switzerland.

A 26-year-old Brathwaite was home for a belated Christmas break when the Flames offered a job.

Fred Brathwaite was a fan favourite at the Saddledome.

Except that they wanted him to fly east, not west.

“I was back in Ottawa and I got a call from my agent saying, ‘Hey, the Flames would like you to go down to Saint John and play because they don’t have any goalies because everyone is hurt,’ ” said Brathwaite, now the goaltending coach for the New York Islanders. “So at that time, I said, ‘Yeah, I would love to go to Saint John, but the only problem is my equipment has gone back to Calgary with the national team.’ So they said, ‘Well, come to Calgary because we need a goalie for practice anyway, and then you can fly out to Saint John on the weekend.’ OK, perfect.

“And then they said, ‘You know what? We want you to play tomorrow against Dallas.’ So I kind of got thrown in against Dallas and ran from there. It was a whirlwind, probably, four-day event, and then I ended up staying there for two-and-a-half years.”

Indeed, Brathwaite would never board that flight to Saint John.

He delivered a 21-save shutout against the Stars, helping to snap the Flames out of their eight-game skid.

He made 33 stops in a losing effort two nights later, then allowed just one goal on 32 shots in another W in his next start.

He was soon a fan favourite at the Saddledome. (“I think they were more happy that a goalie was sticking around and not getting hurt every second day,” he quipped.)

After Theo Fleury was traded to the Colorado Avalanche in late February, the mid-season addition emerged as the eventual winner of the Molson Cup, awarded to the guy who accumulates the most three-star points.

With Brathwaite proving he should stay and others checking out of the infirmary, Garner was returned to junior, Trefilov returned to the International Hockey League, Giguere returned to the farm club in Saint John.

Nestak, hopefully, returned his rental tuxedo before he incurred any late charges.

This is now a hard-to-believe chapter in Flames’ franchise history.

They finished ninth in the Western Conference that season, falling six points short of earning a playoff invite, but Sutter insists it’s way too soon to write off the Golden Knights, who have now dropped three in a row after an 8-1-0 intro that made them the feel-good hockey story of the fall.

“You look at what’s going on in Las Vegas … It is a rallying call, and it makes guys care for each other and think about each other and feel for each other,” said Sutter, who was head coach for four NHL organizations and is now skipper of the senior-level Innisfail Eagles. “And when you do that, it’s amazing how they want to help each other and not let each other down.

“There was a lot of teams hated playing against us that year, even though it was a revolving door with the goalies.”

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